Producing the Gospels
Based on an ancient black and white photograph of a lost painting, this is an attempt to imagine its original colours. The angel alongside St. Matthew is helping him to write, thus emphasizing God’s supernatural role in directing the gospel’s content.
St. Matthew is often portrayed accompanied by an angel. This comes from the ancient Church tradition of associating each of the gospel writers with one of the four living things that surround the throne of God. There was one like an ox, one like a lion, one like an eagle and one with the face of a man (Ezek 1:10, Rev 4:7). The human faced creature, presumed to be an angel, was the one most often associated with Matthew.
Eventually, some of those who had witnessed Jesus’ miraculous signs and listened to his teaching, or had received the particulars by word of mouth, began to committed the details to writing. Amongst those early documents was Matthew’s Gospel, the only extant record of the Sermon. Similar teaching also found its way into the other synoptic gospels, Mark and Luke, and non-canonical works such as the Gospel of Thomas.
It is likely that Jesus delivered the Sermon in Aramaic, the language of his countrymen, though, many would have been equally conversant with Greek. Early traditions suggest that an Aramaic version of Matthew’s Gospel preceded the Greek version with which we are now familiar (for more on this see Chapter 1 of The Emmaus view).
The three synoptic gospels share a similar view (or synoptic) of Jesus’ ministry. However, for most of the Church’s history, its academics accepted the tradition that the apostle Matthew produced the first Gospel. Therefore, Matthew’s Gospel, being also the longest of the synoptic gospels, was given prominence over the others.
It would be nice if the study of internal evidence confirmed the priority given to Matthew, but unfortunately it is not that clear cut. This is because each synoptic gospel appears, to some extent, dependent upon the other two. The conundrum of sorting out their relationships has become notorious amongst bible scholars who refer to it as the synoptic problem.
The traditional, or Augustinian, solution to the synoptic problem placed Matthew as the first Gospel, Matthew then influenced Mark and both influenced Luke. Several other solutions have been suggested, but in the eighteenth century two in particular began to challenge the traditional perspective. The first was a two-source hypothesis, in which Matthew was derived from Mark’s Gospel and a hypothetical body of material known as Q (from the German for source, i.e. quelle). The second was the Griesbach hypothesis, which places Matthew first, derives Luke from Matthew and then Mark from Luke. A possible scenario for this might be as follows:
- Matthew wrote in Aramaic for the benefit of the priests, who converted in large numbers around 31 C.E. (Acts 6:7);
- Matthew, whose original occupation required fluency in Greek, paraphrased his original work into that language for the benefit of Luke;
- With the input from Matthew, Luke wrote his gospel, which, with its continuation in Acts, he intended as a less controversial account for submission as evidence to Paul’s trial in Rome (circa 60-62 C.E. and the point at which Acts finishes);
- As the Romans were familiar with Luke’s Gospel, this was the text Peter used when preaching amongst the Roman church. It was this preaching that provided the basis of Mark’s Gospel;
- As the gentile church expanded, the Greek version of Matthew found its way into the public domain and became the preferred version.
The two-source hypothesis became very popular in the twentieth century, but, as its under-girding assumptions come under increasing scrutiny, that popularity seems to have past its zenith. Meanwhile, the Griesbach hypothesis, which it formerly eclipsed, is now regaining ground in a variant known as the two-gospel hypothesis.
The two-source hypothesis requires that an editor, probably in the early post-apostolic church, crafted the Sermon from a range of previously unconnected sayings. Yet, the nature of the Sermon, with its coherent and multi-layered message, targeted at an authentically Jewish audience and closely addressing the particular circumstances of Jesus’ earliest ministry, would seem to argue strongly against this. By contrast, the two-gospel hypothesis requires no such process of fragmentation and later re-integration. It also allows the Sermon to pass into Matthew’s Gospel as the single entity that it appears to be.
. . . now lets take a look athow the Sermon has been interpreted